Vote to Test Party’s Local, Regional Power : Soviet Union: Political landscapes of three republics hinge on what dominates at the polls today: anger or apathy.

“Want to change your life?” the sign on the nearly empty grocery store in Moscow’s eastern suburbs asked provocatively. “Nominate your own candidates!”

More than a few of the store’s customers, angered by week after week of barren shelves, took up the challenge of the political activists and nominated neighborhood leaders in today’s elections for seats on the Moscow City Council, the district council and the parliament of the Russian Republic.

“How much of a difference these elections will make, we don’t know,” Sergei M. Melnikov, a tool and die maker, commented Saturday as he surveyed a wall covered with election posters near the grocery. “I doubt whether any of these candidates can put vegetables back on the shelves or meat onto the counter or put up a block of apartments for us.

“But at least we will have told the bosses that we do not like the way they are running this country, and we will have put some of our people in to watch them close-up and to see if the job cannot be done better.”

Across the Soviet Union, voters have begun electing new local and regional governments as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s political reforms begin to move out from the Kremlin and the Communist Party’s Central Committee to lower levels of the country’s political structure, where the issues are in sharper focus and the popular discontent is felt more acutely.

The elections also are a key phase in Gorbachev’s efforts to renew republican and local governments and shift power from the party to them, ending the prolonged alienation that has become characteristic of the Soviet political system.

In today’s elections, voters throughout Russia, the largest republic in the Soviet Union, and the Ukraine and Byelorussia--which together constitute the Slavic heartland of the country--will choose among candidates for the three republican parliaments and for regional and local councils, known in Russian as “soviets.”

More than 6,700 candidates are vying for the 1,068 seats in the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies. In the Ukraine, 3,091 people are competing for the 450 seats in the republic’s legislature. In contrast with last year’s parliamentary elections, very few seats are uncontested, and some are sought by as many as 20 candidates. The first results are expected Monday.

Elections have already been held in the Baltic republic of Lithuania, in Moldavia on the border with Romania and in several republics in Central Asia, and runoffs are planned in constituencies where there was no clear winner. Similar elections will follow this month in Estonia and Latvia, two other Baltic republics, and in the remaining republics of Central Asia.

Power, local but quite real, is at stake, and the political bosses who have long been accustomed to ruling their small fiefdoms without hindrance from Moscow and with scant heed to their citizens are facing ouster in many places.

The government newspaper Izvestia acknowledged in a front-page editorial Saturday that the elections have been flawed by a lack of experience and too little information about local issues. But it said that, nevertheless, “ perestroika for the first time in decades has made political power directly dependent on the people’s will.”

Pro-democracy groups, reformist Communists and nationalists have put up candidates in virtually every constituency to challenge Communist Party nominees who previously were elected unopposed.

And the party bosses, who have been warned by Gorbachev that they will lose their jobs if they lose the election, are fighting back with lavish campaign promises, a frenzy of construction on long-delayed projects and some ballot-box stuffing reported in the provinces.

But the bosses are battling a palpable anger that could turn the election into a protest vote against the party and government that would in turn transform the country’s political landscape.

“I am not sure whom I am going to vote for,” Svetlana Orlov, a schoolteacher, said as she stood with Melnikov in the line for potatoes at the grocery, scrutinizing election posters as the queue inched forward. “But I am taking the time to read all this fine print to make sure I don’t vote for anyone who has been in these soviets (councils) before or anyone who has been nominated by the party. We need a complete change.”

Significant political changes have already happened in some areas.

In Lithuania, candidates endorsed by the Lithuanian national movement won enough seats in parliament to form what will probably be the Soviet Union’s first non-Communist government.

The Moldavian Popular Front forced runoff elections in nearly two-thirds of the 380 constituencies and won 65 seats outright; local party leaders, trying to recover, are launching a “campaign of dialogue,” confessing their mistakes, offering to share power and asking for continued support.

And in the Central Asian Kirghiz republic, insurgent candidates forced party nominees into runoffs in two-thirds of the constituencies amid a startling 94% voter turnout.

Paradoxically, however, there is also widespread apathy--a feeling that the country’s problems are now so great that no elections, let alone these for city councils and republican legislatures, will resolve them.

“Sure, we can send all those old guys to the devil, and that is where they no doubt belong,” Stanislav D. Polchyuk, another of the Saturday shoppers, said as the line moved forward a little and the meager supply of potatoes shrank with each step. “But what changes? Does a vote for this guy or that guy mean more potatoes?

“To my mind, the best part about these elections is that we can vote against everyone, against the whole damned system, or not even bother to vote.”

In the Ukraine, miners in Donetsk went on a six-hour protest strike Friday to demand removal of the regional party leadership on grounds that they had failed to implement reforms, and a strike committee spokesman said Saturday that activists will be present at every polling place today to urge voters to cross out the names of all party candidates in a protest vote.

To counter such anger, the shops in many Ukrainian cities have been stocked in recent days with supplies of meat, cheese and other foods chronically in “deficit,” as the government terms shortages. The outgoing Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, in probably its last official act, ordered the closure of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station as demanded by environmental groups. In Moscow, the home constituency of Mayor Valery T. Saikin suddenly got the parking lots that car-owning residents had been demanding for years.

In some areas, party bosses have sought election from relatively safe, rural constituencies--or convinced potential opponents that there was no point in challenging them.

Questions about the fairness of the election in some places were raised Friday when the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that in Tula, 60 miles south of Moscow, official election bulletins had already been printed declaring a party official the winner in one of the contests there. Party officials explained lamely that these were simply meant for training and they had forgotten to stamp them with the word sample.

In the Asian republic of Uzbekistan, security forces clashed Saturday with activists charging election fraud, and some demonstrators were killed, the Associated Press reported, quoting local activists and official sources. It said the incident occurred in Parkent, about 30 miles from the regional capital of Tashkent.

Candidates have complained that, in contrast to last year’s hotly contested parliamentary elections, these elections have been largely ignored by voters, that only the elderly and the party stalwarts have turned out for their rallies. Izvestia reported last week that a third of 5,000 voters questioned in a public opinion survey described the campaign as “uninspiring” or “hot air,” and a quarter said they did not believe the candidates would keep any of their promises if elected.